New mechanical cell-manipulation technique could provide pathways into fixing disorders — even cancer

New mechanical cell-manipulation technique could provide pathways into fixing disorders — even cancer

The signs have been there all along when it
comes to using mechanical stimulation to stimulate regeneration and growth of
tissue by simply pulling or pushing on cells. Think of a pregnant woman whose
womb expands as the baby grows or a doctor telling a patient to lift weights to
fight off osteoporosis by promoting bone growth.

How that mechanical stimulation can take
place, though, has recently reached a whole new level, as evidenced by the
recent academic paper published in the journal Science Robotics in which a team
of researchers was able to fasten a small robot that gently tugged on the
esophagus of a pig for nine days. The result? The pig’s esophagus expanded by
10 millimeters.

“It does look like
mechanical tension is a powerful driving force on the physiology of the
tissue,” says Dana Damian, a lecturer in automatic control and systems
engineering at the University of Sheffield in England, and lead author on the
paper. “And this signal that cells receive for this mechanical stimulation can
regulate the [shape] of the cell.”

The robot works by using two rings to tug
on both ends of the organ through a stretching motion that is regulated by a
computer-application of traction forces. The stretching of the tissue — as the
study found — induces growth inside of the tissue.

“We've long appreciated
that physical forces regulate a lot of biology,” says David Mooney, a professor
of bioengineering at Harvard University who has spent years conducting research
in this field. “If you think about it, the cells in our bodies live in a very
physical world. We walk around and gravity's always pulling on our tissues.
There's blood flow through her heart and the vessels. So it makes sense that
the cells would respond to these environmental signals and alter how they grow,
they how they die and how they specialize in what kinds of functions that they
might have.